Given current changes in education policy related to mediatization (Lingard and Rawolle, 2004), globalization (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010), implementation (McLaughlin, 2006) and the continuous epidemic of educational reform (Levin, 1998), this paper presents an outline of some problems inherent in the application of what have been described as Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 160) to education policy analysis.  This paper provides an outline of three methodological challenges that these processes hold for Bourdieuian studies of educational policy, and introduces some new concepts to address these problems.  The first challenge relates to mediatization, and the effects resulting from the ongoing shaping of education policy and education policy processes through an engagement with the media.  In order to describe and understand these sometimes intermittent engagements, we introduce and develop the concepts of ‘cross-field effects’ and ‘temporary social fields’ to Bourdieu’s approach.  The second challenge relates to globalization and the development of a global education policy field, modeled on Bourdieu’s (2003) account of the global economic field.  The development of such a field challenges the assumption of many social science theories and methodologies of a necessary homology between society and nation-state and its related methodological nationalism. The methodological challenge for Bourdieuian studies related to the emergence of this field is to develop ways to map the contours of this global education policy field and its overlaps with national policy fields – overlaps which might be understood as cross-field effects.  The third methodological challenge relates to policy implementation in a time of fast, globalized policy discourses and to the dislocation between the universalized claims of the state and the contingent and specific logics of school and teacher practices. This disjunction between competing logics of practices offers another useful way to consider what some traditional policy literature has seen as policy implementation deficits.  As Bourdieu (1998) suggested, the state claims a monopoly on the expression of the universal as manifest in the imperialism of policy, yet classroom practices remain contingent, specific and in a state of continual flux. We argue that educational research requires methodological tools to understand and explain incommensurate logics of practice in relation to the state policy field and field of the school as an explanation of implementation ‘deficits’.

The three methodological challenges outlined above will be illustrated through empirical cases which hold implications for research on policy in European education systems. The mediatization of education policy will be demonstrated through an Australian policy case study in relation to the Batterham Review of Australia’s science and technology capabilities (Rawolle, 2005, 2010). The emergent global field case will be articulated via a focus on a global policy as numbers and the creation of a global commensurate space of measurement as with as OECD’s PISA and IEA’s TIMSS and PIRLS (Ozga and Lingard, 2007, Grek, 2009). The incommensurate logics of practice argument will be dealt with in relation to an Australian study of pedagogies (Lingard, 2007). These empirical cases support the development of an approach to education policy analysis using Bourdieu.

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